Stop the presses!!!! Steve Nash talking defense!?!?!? Impossible you say? Well it's not. The new point guard of the Lakers apparently is stressing the importance of defense to his team mates and has been very vocal that he wants he and his team mates to strive for holding opponents to an average of 25 points a quarter or under. But if it sounds like the words defense and Steve Nash do not go in the same sentence here's the man himself on the Lakers defense, their problems, what he's happy with and what he's disappointed with.

Steve Nash on defense (yes I just typed that)

"It's frustrating. We gave up 60 going into the half. We scored 60 but, for us we've got to set our standards higher and try to hold people to 25 point quarters or less and we've got to come out early and be determined to get it down. I thought we played pretty hard tonight and I thought we had some good moments defensively I just think there's a lot of other moments where we're just a "little" bit late, a "little" bit caught off guard. For our team, we're not the fastest team in the world, but we're "big". So we've gotta be early we've gotta anticipate and we've gotta put teams at a disadvantage and we've been struggling to do that consistently. I mean, we do it at times, and there are times we look great defensively, but it's always too little too late."

Steve Nash on turnovers

"We could break down each one and say why. There's a couple of situations we need to clean up, but there's going to be turnovers regardless. So I'm not going to go crazy over our turnovers, of course I'd like to get them down, but that's life and we have to learn to make up for it in other ways."

On playing hard

"It'd be nice to play smarter, but we aren't awful there. It's a little bit of everything with us, there's "moments" when we play smarter there's 'moments' when we play good defensively and there's moments where we turn the ball over and when you add all of that up we struggle and on top of that we're missing a lot of open and easy shots. So you add all that up and at different times and different place somehow or another we find a way to lose games. It's frustrating... In some ways I feel we are getting better but we've got nothing to show for it so we can't feel sorry for ourselves and we've got to keep fighting. We just have to keep playing hard and things will come around for us."

Always love to see Nash challenging the team, he's a great locker room guy to have to keep up the unity but also stress the problems we're having. Great job wording it Steve.

Talk is cheap. Every player in the NBA wants to win a championship, also...doesn't do any good if you're just moving your lips about it.

Nash is one of our issues on the defensive end, and he knows (just as we do) that he isn't going to improve on that end of the court, because you don't magically gain speed at 39 years of age, and unless he's going to put on 25 pounds, he won't get any stronger. Talking about it is his way to make fans think he's got his mind set on defensive improvements, but in reality, he's wanting his Phoenix offense on deck, and a team that can outscore anyone else.

that's still 100 PPG allowed which would put us...right where we are now.

They can win more holding teams to 100. Make the playoffs and get crushed. If that is the scenario, I'd rather just keep losing and start cutting everyone loose and rebuild. Team is not built to win now.